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Was It a Mistake to Protest Against Morsi?

By on Jan 6, 2015 in Featured, Politics | 1 comment

On the 30th of June, 2013, we took to the streets to protest the rule of Dr. Mohamed Morsi, a member of the so-called Muslim Brotherhood, and then president of Egypt. We protested against him, and our reasons were as diverse as we ourselves were; some of us were with the revolution and against the Muslim Brotherhood, some of us were clearly Mubarak loyalists who salivated at the chance to depose the Brotherhood, and some of us had, ostensibly, gone down to protect their Egyptian ‘Identify’ from the Pseudo-Islamist fascism that we had all seen crystalized before our eyes in the mostly-Islamist parliament in which we had seen the face of so-called ‘Political Islam’. Since that day, since Morsi was removed, events have taken on their own momentum; the military exploited our protests just as it had exploited the revolution from the very start. The generals took control just as they had...

Egypt: Waiting for Sunset

By on Dec 23, 2014 in Featured, Politics | 0 comments

How long must we endure? It is difficult to take events in Egypt seriously right now. It has become normal to see legal and judicial travesties on a daily basis; a news story about two people being arrested for speaking English while on the subway, another story about a man getting arrested, or brought by a mob to a police station, for writing the frequency of satellite channels on a bathroom wall, as though it were some sort of political pornography. We are almost used to the frequent violations of the basic legal rights of anybody suspected of homosexuality or atheism, as though those were crimes when even Egypt’s mockery of a legal system has not yet found the time to officially criminalize them. The courts, initially resorted to by human rights activists, have about as much blood on their hands now as the police force does. The army has become, first covertly, but now quite...

Le Morte d’Egypte

By on Oct 30, 2014 in Featured, Politics | 0 comments

Excuse the title. I like the Camelot myths. I’ve never read the original Malory though and wasn’t quite so interested in it when I was a child. The whole knight in shining armor thing never quite caught my fancy. However, I was lucky enough, years later, to run into The Sword in the Stone, T.H. White’s wonderful take on the Arthurian myths, in the first volume, we see a young Arthur, slowly becoming aware of what Merlin’s oblique lessons were forcing him to understand. It is a key moment, and here it is, brutally shortened, for your benefit. It’s still a bit long for an excerpt, but it’s important, and if you give me your attention for a few minutes, you’ll see why it’s so important that you get a feel for how it unfolds… “I have been thinking,” said Arthur, “about Might and Right. I don’t think things ought...

Imagine…

By on Jul 6, 2014 in Politics | 2 comments

Imagine that your country was run by a corporation. Now imagine this corporation has managed to take over at least a third of the country’s assets. Imagine if this corporation enacted laws that allowed it to enlist most of the young men in the country as slave labor, getting paid peanuts, and having to work all day, sometimes in productive jobs, and sometimes sending men to do nothing more than smoke cigarettes as they stood in a deserted spot of land. Imagine that this corporation was run by a cabal of businessmen who were above all the laws, and subject to none of them – so that they were not held accountable to the country or to its laws. Imagine further that this corporation could not only ignore the law but could actually change laws to suit itself. Imagine if this corporation was not only exempt from taxes, but was actually partly funded by taxes, and received further...

The Alternatives You Ignored

By on Jun 3, 2014 in Politics | 0 comments

A few points need to be made here. First of all, I find it at least a bit strange when people refer to me as part of a ‘you’ that they call the ‘opposition’ and then tell me that this ‘we’ was supposed to create a coalition, and that since we have ‘offered none’ – I therefore have no right to ‘complain’. I am a video producer, a photographer, a graphic designer, a writer, and a musician. I am not, nor have I ever been, a politician. If I protested, it was not for a political party or a political ideology, when I write, it’s not for a party or an ideology, and the only ‘entity’ with which I’ve had any kind of regular attachment is the No Military Trials for Civilians group, of whose work I am very proud and by whose other members I am constantly humbled. My interest in the revolution from Day 1 has...

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